Tracking the elusive ROI of blogging

There was no such thing as blogs written about blogging. No such thing as FeedBlitz or email subscriptions. No such thing as social share buttons or Livefyre. Nowhere to go for blogging inspiration.

It was just a blank screen, some incomplete thoughts, and a publish button. (At least for us it was.)

Fast-forward four years when we actually put some goals in place for Spin Sucks, and it was things such as, “Increase visitors by 36 percent,” and, “Add one guest blogger every day.” What we were missing, though, was the ROI of blogging, in terms of getting clients from all the work we were doing.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, producing content, producing engaging content, and producing a variety of content are the biggest challenges for content marketers. But 33 percent also said they are unable to measure its effectiveness.

This is where we were stuck in the fall of 2010. We had exceeded the goals—which I’ll today refer to as vanity goals—we set at the beginning of the summer, but we still weren’t making any money from the blog.

We batted around some ideas. Should we sell content? Should we create a subscription-based professional development site? Should we host paid webinars?

The answer to all of those questions was yes, and we embarked on trying to generate revenue from each of them.

We created e-books and sold them for $9.99. We built monthly webinars and charged $50 to attend. We even developed a professional development site called Spin Sucks Pro that cost $50 per month to join.

It all flopped.

Well, not entirely flopped, but we didn’t make enough money to cover the costs to create these things, and we certainly will never recoup the costs in building Spin Sucks Pro.

So, what works?

A little more than a year ago, we sat down and looked at the assets we had created and considered the freemium model that exists online. We decided charging for content wasn’t the way to go, and we began to offer all that for free.

That meant we were back where we were in 2010 and still had no idea how to make money from all these efforts. We still didn’t have an ROI of blogging.

This past January, we decided to stop trying to make money on content and to drive new clients from the reputation we had built.

Today, 40 percent of our new business has come directly from Spin Sucks. Which means prospects are finding the blog—either through search engine optimization or word-of-mouth—and liking what they read.

It’s fairly easy for us to track that right now because it’s a simple, “How did you learn about us?” when they first approach us. For consumer businesses or organizations with more than 100 or so customers, that gets a little more difficult, but setting up a mechanism to learn how people know about you is the easiest—and most efficient—way to track your blog’s effectiveness (assuming lots of them say, “I read your blog!”).

It’s true you can’t measure brand awareness and reputation, but if you use your blog to achieve those two goals, the revenue will follow.